Like his contemporary and rival Sigmund Freud, Robert Musil boldly explored the dark, irrational undercurrents beneath the calm surface of bourgeois life. The Confusions of Young Torless, published while he was a student, uncovers the bullying, snobbery, and vicious homoerotic violence at an elite boys' academy.<BR>Unsparingly honest in its depiction of the author's tangled feelings about his mother, other women, and male bonding, it also vividly illustrates the crisis of a whole society, where the breakdown of traditional values and the cult of pitiless masculine strength were soon to lead to the cataclysm of the First World War and later to the rise of fascism. A century later, Musil's first novel still retains its shocking, prophetic power.